Monday, 28 July 2014

‘Absolutely fab guide to glorious stained
glass windows’ gushed a recent Times
headline (19 .7.14). The sub-heading was more informative: ‘St Mary’s,
Fairford – famous for its stained glass – has launched an all-star
audio-guide’. ‘All-star’ is about right, for Joanna Lumley (hence ‘Absolutely fab’),
Mark Rylance, Zoë Wanamaker et al. have contributed to a new
audio-guide describing arguably the most important set of stained glass windows
in England. The Fairford windows are important because they are, uniquely, a
complete set, made between 1500 and 1515, filling the whole church: a final
flowering of late medieval art, fascinating alike for their colour, their
composition and their content.

I discussed the Fairford windows earlier
this month during a lecture in Salisbury about George
Herbert and Stained Glass. I wanted to examine the different ways in which
Herbert’s contemporaries, and Herbert himself, responded to stained glass at
the beginning of the 17th century. At this time, Fairford’s windows
were only just over one hundred years old – more ‘modern’ than Victorian glass
is to us today – but already celebrated:

Each pane instructs
the laity

With silent
eloquence, for here

Devotion leads
the eye, not ear,

To note the
catechizing paint,

Whose easy note
doth so acquaint

Our sense with
gospel that the creed

In such a hand
the weak may read;

Such types even
yet of virtue be,

And Christ as
in a glasse we see.

from ‘On Fairford Windows’

by William Strode (1600-1643)

Not everyone took it for granted that
stained glass spoke ‘with silent eloquence’ Here is the Bishop of Oxford, in
1629, preaching at the consecration of the new Chapel of Lincoln College,
Oxford:

This place above
all the rest hath most need of consecration, the Pulpit. If this be not
sanctifyed to the preacher, and the preacher to this, all the whole chappel is
the wors for it….The Altar shall be
called no more an Altar but a dresser. The reuerence [that] is done there shall
be apish cringing, and all the seemly glazing be thought nothing but a little
brittle superfluity.

How should the Fairford stained glass properly
be described? I have called it ‘a final flowering of late medieval art’ but
does ‘medieval’ really fit as a label for works of art commissioned during the
reign of Henry VII and completed during the reign of Henry VIII? Technically,
it’s Tudor art, and we think of the Tudors as post-medieval; but it hardly
seems to belong to the world of Hans Holbein, nor even to the stained
glass of King’s College Chapel, with which it is almost contemporary, any
more than the stained glass of the great Victorian designer Charles Eamer Kempe
(1837-1907) belongs to the world of his exact contemporary, the
post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne
(1839-1906). It was in thinking about the impact of the first Post-Impressionist
Exhibition in London that Virginia Woolf famously remarked, ‘On or about
December 1910 human nature changed.’ But even she later admitted, ‘The change
was not sudden or definite … But a change there was, nevertheless’.

In my lecture I tried to show how change is
evident, even in the Fairford glass. I took as an example a scene showing
Christ with his mother. This is a strange scene because it depicts Jesus visiting
his mother immediately after the Resurrection – an event for which there is no
biblical authority: it is to Mary Magdalene that he appears, in the garden of
Joseph of Arimathea, where he is mistaken for the gardener. That scene appears
any number of times in medieval and later glass, but a private meeting between
Christ and his mother does not: indeed, it was the kind of ‘unauthorised’, apocryphal
episode to which post-Reformation preachers took exception.

Look carefully at the window itself. At
first it seems entirely conventional: a tableau in which the two figures are
static and the text inscribed above the head of Jesus, ‘Salve Sancta Parens’ – ‘Greetings, holy parent’ – formal to a
fault. (It was, I realise, medieval glass designers who invented the speech
bubble.)But unlike ‘Noli me tangere’ windows, which
often vividly depict Mary Magdalene’s despair / shock / joy at encountering and
finally recognizing Jesus in the garden, in this Fairford window the two
figures seem almost embarrassed: Mary keeps her distance and Jesus, his feet
poised on the very threshold of the scene, keeps his eyes down and looks as if
he wants to walk out of the picture altogether.

And this is the problem. The artist has
become so intent on ‘staging’ the scene that the scenery seems

to matter more
than the subject. The room in which the meeting that never actually happened
takes place is rendered in startling detail: delicate red shafts supporting the
vaulted ceiling, leaded lights in the window of the back wall, three books on
top of the tall settle next to the door through which Mary has entered – her
bedroom door, since her bed can be glimpsed through the doorway. There is an
extraordinary depth to the room, accentuated partly by the elaborate tiled
floor but also by the fact that, though we look up from below to view the
window, the artist’s POV is well above the heads of the two figures.
Consequently, the perspective doesn’t quite work. You could say the same about
the window as a whole: while the non-story it tells reflects the late medieval
cult of the Virgin Mary, the setting for this story reflects the Renaissance
fascination with the complexities of perspective. Somewhere between the scene
and the scenery, the vitality of medieval stained glass has leached away.

You may say I’m missing the point; but my
point is that the glass that came 250 years earlier (see for instance, my first
post in this mini-series, Reading
Stained Glass i: Rouen) and that which came only 25 years later (the
stained glass of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) had an artistic energy and
authenticity that this window from Fairford, for all its interest, simply
lacks.

[illustrations:
(i) Detail of a window in St. Mary’s, Fairford: Christ appearing to his mother
after the Resurrection (ii) Detail of a window from King’s College Chapel,
Cambridge: the Resurrection of Christ

I am also discussing the glass at Fairford in posts to my blog for the Kempe Trust. See for instance, Pevsner and Kempe (i)

Tuesday, 1 July 2014

All day it has rained, and I have been stuck
in my hotel room in Saint
Germain-en-Laye. Saint Germain is west of Paris, nearly an hour by Metro and RER
from the Gare du Nord. Here Louis XIV and his predecessors held court before
Versailles was built; and here James II, the last Stuart King of England, lived
out his exile and died in 1701; Queen Victoria came to pay her respects at his
tomb in the parish church, and I wonder if young Claude Debussy came out to watch her,
for he was born here in 1862. I wanted to walk one more time in the Château’s grounds, for I expect this will be the last Sunday I shall
ever spend in Saint Germain; but now, thanks to the rain, I’ve missed my
chance.

For the past ten years I have spent a week
here each June, based at the Lycée International de Saint
Germain-en-Laye. As ‘Monsieur L’Inspecteur de Cambridge’, I
have overseen the Language and Literature exams of students from all over
France who take the British version of the Option
International du Baccalauréat (the OIB, definitely not to
be confused with the IB). It’s a job I have greatly enjoyed, especially because
it has given me the chance to work with teachers, Anglophone and Francophone, British
and American as well as French, who are all committed to an unusual educational
project that is bicultural as well as bilingual.

The OIB has brought me to France four or
five times every year, and taken me right across the country: from Strasbourg to
Rouen, to Lyon, Grenoble and Aix-en-Provence. And of course to Paris itself: to
the Ministry of Education, to the rather grim Maison
des Examens in Arceuil; to schools, to the American University and,
only last week, to the Institut d’études avancées.
Twice a year I have helped to run conferences for teachers: two days each
autumn in Sèvres, at the Centre
international d’études pédagogique (CIEP)
and two days each spring, I have come to St Germain, and run training days for
teachers at the Château d’Hennemont. This
building has some history: though it’s a 19th century folly on a
scale that renders the word ‘folly’ simply inadequate, it was the Paris
headquarters of (successively) the Gestapo and Eisenhower’s SHAFE.

In such settings, my lectures and workshops
on teaching literature (poetry particularly) have doubtless seemed tame enough,
but I have found my role as Cambridge Inspector absorbing and rewarding. I have
made many friends through the OIB and am stepping down now only because I
believe you should never outstay your welcome; and, anyway, if you haven’t made
your mark in ten years you’re never going to. Still, I would have liked to
explore Saint Germain one last time – but all day it has rained.

‘All day It Has Rained’
is the title of a poem by Alun Lewis, a
Welsh poet remembered today, if at all, for the poems he wrote during the
Second World War (he died in Burma in 1944):

All day it has rained, and we
on the edge of the moors

Have sprawled in our
bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,

Groundsheets and blankets
spread on the muddy ground

And from the first grey
wakening we have found

No refuge from the skirmishing
fine rain ….

It’s not so much the unheroic couplets as the sprawling lines and unpredictable stresses that count here. It is
almost as though the poet – a soldier in training, under canvas, wet and
listless – is writing up his diary: ‘I
saw a fox’, he notes, ‘And wrote about it in a scribbled letter home.’ For the
squaddies, the boredom and discomfort of their present existence makes both
their past life (‘real’ life, if you like) and the actual war seem equally
trivial, equally distant: ‘We talked of girls,’ Lewis records, ‘and dropping
bombs on Rome’. His poem is a succession of ‘ands’ – one damned thing after
another, in no particular order – as he contemplates a day in which nothing
happens, jotting down thoughts as they come to him

…
the quiet dead, and the loud celebrities

Exhorting
us to slaughter, and the herded refugees …

He, too, out on the moors, is herded like
sheep – like lambs to slaughter, in a certain sense. Here, the ambiguity of ‘to slaughter’ reminds
me of Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Can
you Remember?’ …

… where we went
and whence we came

To be killed, or
kill.

But Alun Lewis is thinking of a different poet
and of another country. He recalls a day when he himself, accompanied by a
‘shaggy patient dog’, went walking in the footsteps of his hero, Edward Thomas.
It was a private pilgrimage …

It doesn’t matter that actually Thomas was
killed by the blast of a shell; it may not matter that it would later be Lewis himself
whose song was stopped by a bullet, in Burma. What counts is the aftershock to
the reader when this apparently random collection of rainy-day memories comes
to an abrupt end with the death of a poet.War does cause abrupt ends. But it’s a reminder, too, that Thomas’s ‘song’,
his poetry, did not end, being read and valued today more highly than ever. Alun
Lewis has played his part in ensuring this is so: back in the 1940s, Edward
Thomas was neither widely read nor known. W.H. Auden was right to declare (in ‘In Memory of
W.B. Yeats’) that ‘poetry
makes nothing happen’. But he was right, too, that ‘it survives’: good poetry matters for what it
is, not for what it does. Verse that sets out to make things happen is
propaganda, not poetry.

I should have liked, very much, to share
‘All Day It Has Rained’ with my friends in the OIB; but, as with my farewell
visit to the Château of Saint
Germain-en-Laye, the moment has passed.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk